Ezra Klein Leaving the Washington Post

Wanted a Nate Silver, Bill Simmons, type deal, didn't get it:

Should they have given it to him?

 

Eight figures? How many were after the decimal point?

 

Maybe he was going to take the money and buy a newspaper.

What he should have included in his proposal were subscriptions
delivered by drones.

 

No.

If there's money to be made on the Internet, Jeff Bezos will find it.

 

Bezos knows that the value of a blog is about .99 a month which is the average price they
sell for on Kindle. That would be a lot of blogs sold to cover "8 figures"

 

Who cares? They should just give his job to Lydia DePillis. She's twice as good and 100x less insufferable.

 

"Eight figures" covers quite a wide range, so that question is automatically impossible to answer (especially since we don't know what that budget is intended to cover).

The devil is in the details, of course. But let's say he was asking $15 million over five years. and that that figure covers the entire cost of the website.

- Klein is second only to Silver among data-hungry liberal professionals - the most influential demographic.

- It's a buyers market for these guys right now. The NYT is bleeding talent - the lack of competition is giving the Post an out to do the same. If there weren't a sale in the works, I'd guess (and wow, I'll admit it's a massive guess from someone who's only been within 500 miles of their books once, on a strictly geographic basis) he wouldn't be on the way out. But there are enough newspapers/websites who would love to bring in Klein that there will be a bidding war.

- Rough research suggests Twitter followers are worth $3 or $4 a year. Klein's 400,000 followers alone cover about 10 percent of our imaginary asking price.

- There might be nobody more plugged in than Klein. The man founded Journolist. If you're not reading the morning edition of Wonkblog, you're a step behind in the daily conversation.

- Like Silver, Klein has a voice. You can't remove him from Wonkblog any more than you can remove Silver from fivethirtyeight. If Klein showed up under a random handle here, for example, he would quickly become one of the posters with whom people most engaged.

- My second-biggest critique of Klein is an asset from a money-making point of view - he's a little too willing to resort to click-bait. The reason Silver is hands-down better than Klein is that Silver's content is so smart and so well-constructed that he doesn't often need to resort to click-bait.

- That leads to the biggest problem with Klein - he badly misses the point more often than he should. I think he tries to tack toward center to establish broader credentials sometimes. I think every columnist needs to know how to throw flames, and Klein's usually awful when he tries. The reason Silver gets to write his own check and Klein doesn't is that Silver doesn't rely on what people say; he susses out what's actually happening based on data. He is, frighteningly enough, an anomaly in that he works hard to get the facts.

- That said, Klein - assuming my guess is right - will get his asking price,and his new bosses will make money.

 

Soon, he will be living in a van down by the (Potomac) river.

 

MSNBC seems to have regular openings every couple of months.

 

Boo hoo for Klein's vanity endeavor. I'd like to see a young journalist's "pet project" be a return to real, hard-hitting, skeptical, unbiased journalism scrutinizing all with equal level of vigor.

Field's wide open.

 

You mean like ProPublica, CIR or InsideClimate News, which just won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting? Or the eBay founder's soon-to-launch new watchdog site with Glenn Greenwald?

We could use a lot more of them, sure, but they are out there and they're doing great work.

 

Yeah but there's also Murray Chass